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Interesting article over at Conversation Marketing about bidding on your own brand name. The post throws up some good arguments, but like all things in life one rule simple does not fit all. Aswell as reasons to bid on your own brand there are equally very good arguments against bidding on brand and it really depends on the business circumstances as to whether it makes sense for you.

When bidding on brand one thing you should always do is track brand performance separately from your non brand campaigns.

There are some agencies who will encourage you to bid against your brand and then proceed to lump it all into one to make the overall figures of your campaign appear far more successful than they actually are; effectively hiding the poorer performance of non brand campaigns.

Things to consider when bidding against your own brand -

1) Other Advertisers
2) Organic Placement
3) Brand Volume
4) Affiliates

1. Other Advertisers - Are there any other adverts displaying against your brand? If there are other advertisers appearing against your brand then I would advise to bid against your brand no matter where you are placed organically. This increases your exposure or shelf space so to speak. If you have a trademark, submit an application to Google to stop other advertisers appearing against your brand in the UK. For US advertisers this works a little differently, you can’t trademark protect keywords, only the use of your trademark within adtext. So those targetting the US will have to maintain a degree of vigilance in monitoring the SERPS if at the time of checking their were no other advertisers.

2. Organic Placement - Where are you placed organically? You should be in the very top position for your brand unless you have an extremely generic or competitive brand name (or a new site!). If you are not top then you should bid against your brand to avoid losing any visitors. If you are top organically and there are no advertisers bidding against your brand then it makes sense to save your money and not bid against your brand. You should however take into consideration point number 4.

3. Brand Volume - How much volume do you get to your brand?. If your brand volume is quite low then cost will be equally small. However, if you are a large brand, bare in mind that you could get a serious amount of your volume going through the PPC advert obviously at a cost. In theory the larger brands should be able to afford this, but it still might be better spent elsewhere.

4. Affiliates - You should have terms and conditions in place to limit affiliates from bidding against brand anyway, whether that’s paid or organically. Obviously if you don’t have affiliates this will not be a problem, but those that do need to consider affiliates because bidding against your own brand can act as protection, especially in the US where you cannot trademark the use of keywords.

Conclusion

In general if you have no other advertisers displaying adverts against your brand name and you are placed at the top organically, then you should not bid against brand. There is no need to pay extra when the difference in clicks from a top organic placement against aggregate clicks via an organic top placement with a PPC advert are generally fairly small. I have seen the research which shows increases, but I have also seen many instances where you are simply paying a cost with no extra benefit.

Although average CPC’s on branded keywords in these circumstances are also very small, if you are a large brand then actually this can equate to a significant amount of volume. Some brands can incurr costs into the thousands each month as an example.

Would this spend not be better funelled back into the paid or organic search campaign?. That said, you will need to monitor your brand within the SERPS, in terms of other advertisers and affiliates especially if you do not have a trademark or are based in the US.

A Happy Medium

There are mediums to be had when bidding on brand. If you are concerned that you are losing out on some misspellings of brand or long tail brand related queries then you can use embedded match to show for the queries you want to.

This allows you to bid broad on your core brand keyword(s) and negatively match out exact (or phrase) match keywords where you are sure you rank organically in top positions. So you can run search query reports (and use log data) to negatively match out further queries you identify where you rank in the top position and believe you would be incurring cost for no reason. Alternatively you could just bid using exact match where you believe you need to show your ad. The Adwords example from the help centre explains embedded match

Although there are thousands of ways you can promote your business online, two well-known methods are search engine optimisation and paid advertising. Paid advertising can be done in the form of PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google Ads or paying other webmasters and bloggers to display your link on their websites and blogs with your chosen anchor text.

SEO on the other hand is based on naturally ranking higher on search engines. You are ranked for the kind of information — content — that you have on your website.

Both SEO and paid search engine marketing have their pros and cons but in this post I’ll list some reasons why you should prefer natural search engine optimisation over paid search engine marketing.

• SEO is long-lasting: Once done properly, only a big shake in the search engine ranking algorithms can move you from your place and that too only happens if you have relied upon some unreliable ranking tactics.
• Search engine users trust naturally appearing links more: This has been proved again and again that search engine users when given a choice first click on links that appear as the natural result of their search and mostly stay away from “sponsored” or PPC links.
• SEO is far cheaper: In paid search engine marketing you have to pay for every click whether it fetches you business or not. Some of the search terms are very competitive and hence you have to pay a lot for them. For some keywords PPC advertisers pay even more than $100 per click. Once you get a higher ranking naturally, your clicks are practically free.
• SEO keeps your website in good condition: Good SEO practices ensure your website is completely accessible and adheres to all web design and development recommendations and protocols.
• SEO improves your conversion rate: SEO, in real sense, means targeting right keywords and search terms, and it definitely doesn’t mean targeting every possible word under the sun but ignoring the ones that can fetch you business. Intelligent SEO practices help you attract the right crowds and this in turn does wonders to your conversion rate.

I hope these pointers help you make up your mind. To be frank I’m not totally averse to paid search engine advertising because although SEO is highly rewarding, it takes its own time and till then you cannot simply wait for your links to turn up on the search engine result pages. So put your energies into search engine optimising your website but by all means in the mean time if you can afford it, start generating some traffic, and some business, through paid search engine advertising.

Managing your Google AdWords campaign well is very critical to your online business success especially if plan to get lots of business from Google users.

Google AdWords Explained

Although it is highly unlikely, in case you don’t know what are Google AdWords, these are those link boxes that appear at the top or on the right hand side when you search for certain terms and phrases on Google. They are pay-per-click ad campaigns that means the advertisers pay Google for every click Google sends their way. This form of online advertisement is so popular that for Google AdWords is the main source of income.

How Google AdWords Works

The algorithm handling Google AdWords ads might be complex, but the logic is simple. There are two things that affect your AdWords ad placement when you run an ad campaign:

• Maximum cost per click you are ready to pay
• The performance of your advertisement

It’s the second point that makes Google AdWords so popular among the advertisers. It doesn’t matter how much money you can pump in; unless your advertisement generates enough clicks, unless it performs, that is, it’s not going to get the placement ranking you desire. So even a company like Nike may appear below you if your ad performs well. This creates a level playing field for everybody and it also makes good business sense for Google. More low-cost clicks are always better than few high-cost clicks.

So the trick is, achieve the highest possible position for the lowest possible cost. And this is something that I want you to achieve after reading this article.

If you follow a few things mentioned in this article I can safely say there is no need to hire a profession AdWords management company, although you can, and should hire them in case you don’t have enough time at your hand.

Target High-Precision Keywords

You can lose lots of money by not targeting the right keywords. Once your ad starts appearing for your selected keywords, you’ll start getting clicks, and you’ll start paying for those clicks. What if 80% of those clicks were never meant for you and they merely happened because your ad appeared for wrong, or misleading, or confusing keywords?

Let’s take “web designing” for instance. A very costly phrases in terms of PPC advertising. But if you are providing web design services and you want only those people to click your ad who are looking for a web designer or a web design company, do you really think “web designing” is a good keyword for you? I’ve personally experienced that people who are searching for online tutorials and trips and tricks mostly search for “web designing”. A good term for you would be “web designer” or “web design company”.

Better, if you want to target an audience only in London, it’ll be more profitable if you target something like “web designer in london” or “web design company london” or “london web designers” or something like that.

I understand that when you are just starting your Google AdWords campaign you are pretty much excited about getting traffic for all sorts of keywords, but keep in mind that you are paying for every click.

Use less competitive, Long Tail keywords that will get you focused traffic. If you are selling Nokia phones you should use “Nokia 6110 Navigator” to drive clicks to that model’s page instead of using simply Nokia to drive traffic to your home page. Well, this brings us to

Use Different Landing Pages For Different Keyword Sets

A Google AdWords campaign means nothing without a good landing page. Don’t just drive all the traffic to your home page because your home page means different things to different people, more so if you are offering multiple products and services. In fact your landing page is so important that Google provides you a landing page optimising tool so that you can tweak and optimise your landing page.

Since you are paying for every single click, and paying dearly sometimes, it is better to increase your conversion rate to decent level and you can only achieve this by having the perfect landing page.

If you can manage, have a dedicated landing page for every keywords, or for every keyword-group.

Google also lets you track the conversion rates of your landing pages so that you can stop using the landing pages that don’t perform well and use those landing pages more that perform better.

Use the [Exact Match] if possible

Google AdWords lets you set the following phrase-matching options when you are entering the keywords you want to bid on:

• Broad match: This is the default option, and I’d say, the most inefficient way of selecting the search options. Here, if you enter content management software it will show your ad for all possible combinations of the three words, plus, if they are used in conjunction with some other word. So whether it is management software or content software or buy content or something else, your ad will appear for all of them, attracting tons of unwanted clicks and hence, expense.
• Phrase match: In this phrase match option your ad appears for the phrase match plus for any other word appearing with the phrase. So if you use “content management software” (with double quotes) it will not only show your ad for content management software but also for free content management software, download content management software, download content management software, content management software in php, etc.
• Exact match: This is the best way of entering your keywords and it can get you the highest conversion rate (although fewer links). For exact match you enclose your keywords within [ and ]. Hence, if you enter [buy content management software] your ad will only show up for this search term and nothing else. This drastically reduces the clicks you get but since people come to your website through the exact search term the conversion rate is quite high.
• Negative match: Suppose you don’t want to appear for the word free If you use -free content management software your ad won’t appear for the search terms containing the string free. Use this option to mark for all the keywords and phrases you don’t want to appear for.

I suggest you use the exact match whenever possible because then people see your ad for exactly the thing they are looking for.

Define Your Ad Copy Clearly

Well, this goes without saying. The purpose of your Google AdWords is not just to drive traffic (in some case it can be the sole purpose but I’m talking in general sense) but to drive traffic that converts, that is, traffic that gets you business. So don’t use misleading words just to get clicks. If you don’t offer free stuff, don’t use the word “free” in your ad copy.

If possible use the search phrase in the title of your ad, that is, if you are selling a CMS, make your title as “Buy CMS” or something like that. Similarly, in your description clearly state where the link leads to.

Group Your Ad Campaigns

It’s better to organise multiple keywords under various campaign groups. This also helps you in geo-targeting. Different countries and regions use different words to find the same thing. So you can target different countries and states in different groups.

You can also set different tracking URLs for different ad groups to monitor which group of keywords are performing better.

Managing your Google AdWords campaigns is not as intimidating as it seems. Although it does make sense to hire professional AdWords managers if you have hundreds of keywords and scores of tracking pages, for entry-level Google AdWords management, follow the tips mentioned above and you can easily optimise your PPC investments.

Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click search engine advertising, which is better? It depends on what you want at a particular moment.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO means trying to rank well naturally. In organic SEO you don’t pay for every click you get from the search engines. All the clicks from the search engines are free when you appear on the search engine result pages on the merit of the quality of your website. The only money you spend is on getting your website search engine optimised and getting quality content generated for your website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

In pay-per-click advertising you pay for every click you get from the search engines. Both Google and Yahoo! run their own pay-per-click programs. Whereas in Yahoo! your position depends on the amount per click you are ready to pay, in Google’s AdWords your position depends on your bid amount PLUS the performance of your ad.

So which one is better?

Pay-per-click is preferable in the short-term when you want to get quality clicks immediately after launching a new website or introducing a new product. It’s not the best way of getting traffic but it is an effective way. You can start receiving quality hits as soon as you’ve activated your campaign.

Organic SEO is preferred for the long run. It doesn’t make sense to keep paying for every click especially when you talk in terms of thousands of clicks per day. For every major keyword relevant to your website you should try to appear among the top 10-15 results on the search engine result pages.

The search engine users too trust those links more that appear naturally.

I think both organic seo and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have their respective places of importance: it depends on how much time and budget you have at your disposal and what are your immediate and long-term priorities. Let’s first quickly see what organic seo and pay-per-click mean.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO, or natural SEO fetches you higher search engine rankings without paying for the placement. Organic SEO makes the search engines like your website without you having to pay for the affection. For this you have to create and maintain a website that the search engines would love to present to their users when they search for terms related to your website. Organic SEO takes lots of effort and it often takes months to show some tangible results. You can achieve organic SEO by

• Creating lots of relevant content
• Getting quality inbound links
• Creating optimised markup

All these points have been covered in detail in various posts on this blog.

Pay-per-click

Pay-per-click programs get you visibility on the search engines according to the bid you are ready to place per click. This way you can start getting high-quality clicks from the search engines within fifteen minutes of activating your website You can see such links on Google at the top or the right on search engine results pages and on Yahoo under the “Sponsored links” section. Different search engines use different methods for displaying pay-per-click links. For instance, Yahoo places you higher for higher bids, but Google places you higher for the higher number of clicks your link generates.

So should it be organic SEO or pay-per-click

It should be a mixture of both the methods. It’s better to use your PPC campaign in the beginning so that your online presence gets relevant traffic from day one. If you don’t want to spend lots of money on your PPC campaign, you can target the least competitive expressions and start getting traffic for them. In the mean time you can continue your organic SEO efforts. When you feel you are getting good traffic due to organic SEO, you can stop bidding for your keywords.